The Temptation of Saint Jerome

Around 1520 a small number of strange Netherlandish paintings were circulating in Venice, several of them by Hieronymus Bosch, in the collection of Cardinal Domenico Grimani. Savoldo, a Brescian painter working in the city, clearly studied them. He made this panel for a private study room, and it is his attempt at Bosch's world of demons and visions, set in a wide, glowing landscape. The saint in the red robe of a cardinal is Jerome, the scholar who withdrew to the desert, though for a long time viewers took him for Saint Anthony. Behind him the light burns low and orange along the horizon, the kind of glowing dusk Savoldo returned to again and again in his work.